README.md

This uses a podman container to build Slurm, which is then copied out of the container into build/23.02.5/. The build/ directory is NFS-exported to the cluster as /slurm, so nodes see /slurm/23.02.5.

The following arguments to ./configure are important:

• --prefix must match the path the binaries appear to be at (i.e. from the NFS client side). This is because:
  • The slurm{ctld,d,dbd} executables hardcode an RPATH, even when passing the --without-rpath flag to ./configure. This means unless the path they are executed at matches the build prefix, they can't find libslurmfull.so on startup, even with entries in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/.
  • PluginDir defaults to being based on the build prefix. Although it can be overriden in slurm.conf, the slurmds do not appear to get this parameter when running configless, so they won't start saying the (default) plugin dir doesn't exist
• --sysconfdir must match the path the slurm.conf file is at on the nodes. Otherwise s* commands running on nodes without slurmd (i.e. the control node only, for a standard Slurm appliance configuration) cannot find the configuration file unless the SLURM_CONF environment variable set.

Assuming podman is installed, running the following in this directory will build Slurm and copy it out to the host. As the host's root disk was small, the below includes some TMPDIR/tmpdir options to try to place temporary build artifacts on a larger attached volume. However, ~10GB free was still required on the root disk to complete the build.

$ export TMPDIR=/mnt/image-storage/tmp # some large persistent storage
$ mkdir -p build/23.02.5/
$ rm -rf build/23.02.5/*
$ podman --tmpdir=/mnt/image-storage/tmp build \
    --build-arg SLURM_PREFIX=/nopt/slurm/23.02.5/ \
    --build-arg SLURM_SYSCONFDIR=/nopt/slurm/etc/ \
    . -t slurm-23.02.5 \
    --output build/23.02.5/

As a convenience, the output of "./configure --help" is included as configure.help.